We’re shocked, shocked to find out that Trump’s gambling with our future

Help me out. I’m a journalism sort by nature and profession. I’m used to Trump setting his cockeyed sights on the lamestream media. 

For months, though, I’ve found myself defending the news media, in particular The New York Times from attacks from the left. The most common complaint is letting Trump off the hook or failing to fact check him or to catch him in lies. 

Trump and politics itself in the NeanderTrumpian era is a rare species. Trump trades no more in facts or public service than chefs serve spaghetti by throwing it at a wall to see what sticks. Do we expect restaurant critics to squint at the mess to point out which of the pasta’s overcooked? Trump is on stage to tell us to pick it up if we don’t like it. 

Trump is and always has been a huckster with a hypnotic, Svengali-like hold on people. His con artistry has improved with age, even with creeping dementia, so that he now packages and sells it as a finely crafted weave. Some 70 million people are loyal customers. Their confidence is in his pocket. He can and does say whatever he wants. No wonder the Supreme Court has divined him with immunity. They are under his spell and have conjured up an enabler’s wand. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and he wouldn't lose any voters, OK? "It's, like, incredible” and it’s been incredible for more than eight years. 

[Click on photo to read the 2016 story]

We blame the news media. They should do something about it. Biden is too old and frail to campaign or govern. What about Trump? Is that fair that Trump gets a pass? 

Don’t we realize yet that we are way beyond comparing apples and oranges. The NeanderTrumpian era has us comparing apples and orangutans. Apples are about taste and sweetness. Orangutans are endangered, caged animals, with IQs of between 70 and 95. That’s high for orangutans. Probably high for apples too. Orangutans perform for us. 

For months, longer, reporters have been trying almost apoplectically to tame the orangutan, to ask questions, many of them gotcha variants, to get Trump to focus, to insert truth-telling disclaimers for his free-floating fulminations, or to spotlight his inanities. Far too many to hold onto. 

Can’t seem to be done. He’s nailed the perfect orangutan impersonation. It’s an uncanny version of the children’s taunt: “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” 

Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, portends in all-too seriousness that Trump is and will be in office “a Fascist.” 

I’m not a Fascist, Kamala’s a Fascist, a Communist, a Marxist, a dumb woman who just recently realized she’s black. What are reporters to do with all that? Point out with numbing sincerity that Trump has no evidence that Harris is a Marxist, that Harris did well on her board scores.

I would think that showing videos of Trump, saying he "did not know [Harris] was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. Is she Indian, or is she Black?” would level any playing fields and both the news media and the Harris campaign have checked those boxes.

During Hurricane Dorian in 2019 when Trump was president, he updated the public on the direction of the hurricane by doctoring a map with a sharpie to make the case that the storm would hit Alabama. The media’s coverage had been wrong, he claimed. Only he could prevent or fix it.

[Click on photo to read the 2019 story]

When Hurricanes Helene and Milton recently hit Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, Trump took after the media again while leading his acolytes to allege that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is channeling funds to illegal migrants and controlling the weather. The media did their tired duty, pointing out at every conceivable turn that Trump’s claims were baseless. Of course they’re baseless. They’re gunk. Yet they stick after bouncing off him. 

It's beneath me and any of us to need to bring up the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio eating the town’s pets, as if it were remotely plausible. Baseless, I tell you, and so do news outlets. All this does is allow Trump, Vance and the spineless to turn it into an ersatz lesson in immigration policy. 

A different pile of gunk will get heaved the next day and the next. Clean it up, news media, if you don’t like it. 

Another day passes and we get to the proverbial candidate closing arguments – Trump’s in Madison Square Garden and Harris’s on the Ellipse in Washington, DC. As The New York Times reported in “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism,” the inflammatory rally kicked off with a comedian describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocking Hispanics for not using birth control, Jews for being cheap and Palestinians for being rock-throwers. 

The media hopped to it immediately, excoriating the event, pointing out that it’s not just Trump but his henchmen and his license to hate and divide. The media opined across the board that this one looks like it may stick. Even orangutans’ messes can sometimes smother their own.

Yet by morning, Trump had seized on a statement Biden made in a Tuesday eve video call with a Latin voting group that it was Trump’s supporters, not Puerto Rico, who are garbage. Sounded like a reprise from the deadly 2016 Hillary Clinton comment about the "basket of deplorables" supporting Trump. 

Doesn’t matter that I took Biden’s comment to refer to the cast of speakers at Trump’s rally. Trump knows garbage when he sniffs it. By his next public appearance, Biden (de facto Harris) was the villain, the divider of the nation, the threat to democracy. It’s front and center on the Trump-Vance campaign site. Trump manufactured the rubber. The garbage? It stuck to Harris. 

The news media is left dredging up Trump’s garbage, like Walter Matthau did in The Odd Couple. It’s a classic scene. 

"And now, it's garbage.

[Click on photo to watch the scene]

Another scene, even more classic, helps us realize how dumbfounded we pretend to be that Trump has such a stranglehold on the news media and on millions of people in the country. Maybe, they serve as garbage collectors.

As Casablanca showed us: Everybody’s having such a good time. Yes, much too good a time. It must be shut up. On what grounds? [Click on the url to watch the scene]        

We’re shocked, shocked to find out that Trump’s gambling with our future.                                                                         

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Will young people vote?: A college query

I recently retired from Northwestern University where I was a journalism prof. I get to campus regularly and find myself talking with students and becoming acquainted with the priorities of young people; some engaged in campaigns. Many more are turned off to politics. 

When I was in college, I was into politics. I went to school just across the border from Illinois. I was a Chicago guy, proud of my hometown, like young folks are now because of the TV show, The Bear. Yet for most of my four years, Chicago was out of sight, out of mind. 

I lived in a college bubble, so I get how students now can ignore the election and resent people trying to shame them for not paying attention to the debates, the candidates, and the avalanche of intrusive emails and texts. 

One student told me he has no intention of voting, despite issues that matter to him -- the economy, his ability to get a job, afford housing on his own, and abortion. 

A survey of college students earlier this year found that when asked “what they would do if they or their partner became pregnant while in college, most asserted they would seek abortion.” The student said it deeply matters to him that if his partner or a friend became pregnant, she’d be able to turn to abortion. 

An August CBS News poll found that 60% of voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. 

Last month, People Magazine published a story identifying 56 celebrities who’ve shared their abortion stories. They were young women, not celebrities, when they sought an abortion. 

Democrats Harris and Waltz are dedicated to a woman’s right to decide. 

Republicans Trump and Vance treat abortion like a campaign shell game. Under one card, they put Trump’s appointment of Supreme Court justices who did his bidding to overturn a woman’s abortion rights, under another is Vance’s call for a national abortion ban, under another is their mantra to leave abortions to the states. 

I wonder if the student I talked with and others who consider the issue as important still won’t vote. 

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Jack Doppelt is Emeritus Professor of Journalism, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University and co-author of Nonvoters: America’s No-Shows